What’s the right amount of office time?
Nearly half of the British labour force is currently working from home, according to the ONS. I happen to be one of the lucky one in 20 who worked from home before Covid hit and I can find little to miss about the hours I used to spend sitting in a drab, airless office. Modern, open-plan office towers are especially bad. There is no relief from hearing colleagues work the phones or crab about office politics. The temperature is always wrong – too hot for men and too cold for women.
I once worked in an “eco-tower” that featured “smart blinds”, which were meant to lower automatically when they detected too much glare.
After days of the blinds running themselves up and down non-stop they were permanently lowered, plunging us all into gloom. It did not occur to the designers that the people working in the office might be best-placed to judge how they wanted their blinds.
This speaks to the whole philosophy of office design. For example, everything is done in shades of computer grey – the desks, the cheap carpets, the chairs and walls. Is this just a failure of imagination? Is it some sort of cost-saving measure? Or, is the intention literally to drain the colour out of life?
As for taking a tea break, health and safety has long since done away with the kettle and toaster. Other basic tasks have been made deliberately difficult. Because of high cleaning bills, producing waste is practically a crime, so convenient, under-desk bins have been replaced by huge recycling units with narrow slots that have to be wrestled into accepting rubbish.
All of this, especially the noise and unnecessary meetings, must be why a 2014 study by a Stanford economist called Nick Bloom found that letting staff work from home cut staff turnover and increased productivity by an astonishing 13 per cent.
One might think, therefore, that Covid-19 is an unexpected boon. Sadly, Prof Bloom says not. Employees marooned at home by the pandemic tend to lack suitable work spaces, they are at the mercy of interruptions by children and, especially bad for new staff, cannot easily learn from experienced colleagues or enter spontaneous creative exchanges. “I fear this collapse in office face time will lead to a slump in innovation,” he says.
However ghastly offices are, it turns out you can have too little of a bad thing, as well as too much. So much for looking on the bright side.